I totally disagree. I've done a lot of operational and low-level systems work and handling obscure OOM scenarios is /really/, /really/ hard, and not at all wor

I totally disagree. I've done a lot of operational and low-level systems work and handling obscure OOM scenarios is /really/, /really/ hard, and not at all worth the engineering effort. But, even assuming you handle every failed page allocation perfectly and your stack does the right thing, you can still screw yourself /trivially/ by blowing out the network stack, or because the writeback daemon can't keep up with your filesystem writes. So now we're talking about clamping kernel resources with userspace logic that does things like periodic fsyncs and userspace tcp acks before attempting to send more -- good luck.